Under The Radar: College OT Needs New Rule, Why Coaches Love or Hate It, Why Big 12 Teams Struggle o

Time To Update OT Rules: After watching the final 4 minutes of regulation and all 7 overtimes in Texas A&M’s 74-72 win over LSU…..college football’s overtime needs a tweak. After three overtimes both teams have to go for 2 after touchdowns. That takes the thinking and strategy out of coaches’ hands. A proposal to improve OT would be to have all overtime extra points kicked from the 25 yard-line rather than from the 3 yard-line. Now if the other team scores first and kicks the extra point there is more incentive to go for 2 to win it when the extra point is not so automatic. It also creates some intriguing strategy and decision making after every TD in OT.

OT on OT: Why Offensive Coaches Love it and Defensive Coaches Hate It: On every staff the offensive coaches love OT and the defensive coaches hate it. Why? Every OT point counts on your scoring statistics and skews those rankings for the unit you coach. Take a look at LSU and Texas A&M before the game, where they would’ve been had LSU held on to win 31-24 in regulation and then after the final 74-72 score. From the numbers below it's easy to see why defensive coaches hate OT and offensive coaches love it.

Still Talking High-Scoring Games--What's Up With Big 12 Defenses?: On Twitter an OU fan asked me why Oklahoma’s defense gave up so many yards and points to WVU on Friday night in their wild 59-56 win--(In fairness to the OU Defense they won the game by scoring 2 TDs on fumble returns). The reality is this: very few teams recruit enough great players to be very good on both sides of the ball. As a result all teams tilt one way or another and systems matter. You build a team first by making sure you have the type of QB you want. Then you decide where the best 11 players are going--offense or defense? Alabama's Nick Saban is defense-oriented but on his current team he’s recruited enough players to be very good on offense. OU and other Big 12 teams have put the premium on offense first. As a result many of them do not have enough dominant defensive players when facing the type of offenses they are playing each week.

OT on Talking Defense: The other element that is lost is that teams in only spread offenses do not recruit traditional 210-235 pound fullback/ h-back types that could play linebacker/ strong safety on defense if needed. As a result they recruit far fewer Linebacker/Safety type players who are usually a defense's dominant tacklers. With fewer players in the potential pool for linebackers and safeties, if you miss on an evaluation of a guy or two in one class or you have some injuries you will suffer defensively.

The Heisman Trophy Final Campaign Weekend: While it is a foregone conclusion in many people’s mind that Alabama’s Tua Tagovailoa has already won the award…….Oklahoma’s Kyler Murray has thrown for 3674 yards and 37 TDs while rushing for 853 yards and 11 more TDs. Those 853 yards on the ground are 600+ more than Tua. After Saturday’s dominating performance against Michigan the nation’s #1 Defense, Ohio State’s Dwayne Haskins has thrown for over 4000 yards and 42 TDs and led OSU to another Big Ten Title Game against a schedule where 11 of his 12 games were against Power-5 conference teams (2 more than Tua and 1 more than Murray). With all three playing in conference Championship games this weekend all will have one last performance to impress voters.

Screen Shot Of The Week--Dashing Through The Snow: In Pullman the Huskies mushed their way across the snow and into the Pac 12 Title games against Utah next week.